Electricity generated at a power station may be produced using a plurality of energy sources, such as coal powered power station, nuclear fission, wind, or solar photovoltaic (“PV”) cells, etc. This power generated at the power station is transmitted to users over a transmission grid. In recent years advancements have been made in transmission of power to an end user. One such advancement has been in the area of electrical power meters.
An electrical power meter may be implemented as an automatic meter reader (AMR) where the electricity usage is communicated one way to a meter reader. More recently, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) meters have been developed. AMI meters differ from traditional AMRs in that they enable two-way communications between meters and an AMI command and control system. An AMI command and control system may receive data from the AMI meter and communicate it over a network to remote locations. Also, AMI command and control systems may send data to electric meters to perform various tasks.
Utility companies typically rely on meter reading to determine consumption of a utility by its customers. In conventional utility meter reading applications, operators need to come into close proximity to the conventional meter in order to complete a reading. Routes for conventional meters typically defined geographically and may include hundreds or thousands of meters. To determine the order in which meters in a route are read, utilities rely on sequential lists, which can be lengthy.
In areas where AMI meters that can be read remotely are deployed, the route design can be ineffective if a driver is forced to follow a route that includes many AMI meters. Thus, there is a need in the art for a method and system to generate routes by taking into account the presence of both AMI and conventional meters. There is a further need in the art for a tool to quickly determine new routes for meter readers as AMI meter deployment is underway.